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Welcome to another episode of the Volunteer Rid A Pest Podcast with Erik Gardner. And I’m your host Mike Stewart, and I’ve got the question day. Erik, what can I do to prevent rats and mice from coming into my home?
Well, you know, that’s a common problem and it’s one of those year-round issues that people deal with. What we typically do is go out and inspect the home and try to figure out ways that they can get in if the home currently has a problem or if they just want to prevent one. We just look how is it possible for a rat or a mouse to enter that home? Now, a mouse can enter a home with a hole about the size of a dime, so it can be a very small hole. Also in wood or other soft structures like that, they can actually gnaw and enlarge the hole so that they can make their own way to get into the house.
So we look for areas like that and we seal it in a special way. You don’t want to just use some expanding foam because they can gnaw through that. We use copper mesh and expanding foam. The expanding foam will go through all the little folds in the copper mesh and will stick it in the place and they won’t gnaw all through it because something in the copper mesh, I don’t know if it’s the taste or what it is, but they will not gnaw through copper mesh where they will gnaw through steel wool.
So why are rats and mice coming into the house? All times a year, are they looking for food, water, or are they wanting warmth? Or… I mean, I assume they’re in on the outsides. Why are they trying to come into homes and establishments?
It could be a variety of all those things, but typically they’re looking for a food source. You know, if they have a food source on the outside, they typically are going to stay there. Now as the seasons change, it starts getting a little cooler at night, they’ll come in trying to find a warmer place to live. If they don’t have a source of water, sometimes they’ll come into the home looking for a source of water. So it could be all those things. But typically once one rodent finds its way in, they leave what’s known as urine scent trails. So as they go through they’re urinating just a little bit, every few feet, and they can find their way back and also other rodents can find their way in.
So if one gets in your house, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to have more. And that’s the reason. And so once they find a food source in your home, they’ll just stay right in your home. They’ll multiply and you’ll go from having one or two mice to having many, many mice and so… Or rats. And so it’s very important that if you see one, you start taking action at that point to make sure there aren’t a lot of them later.
So as a professional you have solutions to help if you have a rodent infestation, which obviously the rats are, I assume, are bigger than mice, but they’re all disease-carrying rodents. But you have solutions to how are they getting in and stop that and what to do about the ones that have investigated your home? Because I remember years ago we actually heard them in the wall, scratching, and that was a pretty disturbing sound. Do you guys have the solutions if that kind of person calls?
Well yeah, we handle that on a daily basis. The first thing we do is inspect the home, try to figure out how they’re getting in and then we offer a solution as to how to seal it to exclude the rats and mice where they can no longer get in. Now that’s something homeowner can do themselves. We’ll tell them where the openings are and how to seal them and if they want to do it their self, and they are pretty handy then they can, if not, then we’ll give them a price and we can do it. Typically, it’s going to run less than a hundred dollars. It depends on the house, the state of repair it’s in, how old it is, that sort of thing. But once those are sealed up, then we place traps inside the house to catch any that may already be inside.
We try to identify food sources, where they might be getting water, and just things that will make it less hospitable to the rodents, we want to remove that. And we also put bait stations, bait containers outside the house. We don’t typically like the bait inside the house because they could die and give off an odor. We want to do that on the outside. Many homeowners make that mistake. They’ll buy something at the store, put the bait inside the house, the rodent will eat it and then it’ll go inside the wall and die and it will smell up the house for a couple of weeks. So that’s not very pleasant. We try to prevent that.
Well, it sounds like you’ve got the rats and mice in Chattanooga under control, so thank you. So until the next time, this has been the Volunteer Rid A Pest Podcast in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
